1. "I Think I Do but I Don't": Heightened (Breast) Cancer Concern as a Function of Availability Bias.
- Author
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Aguirre-Camacho, Aldo, Gandía-Abellán, Helena, and Tirado-Muñoz, Judit
- Subjects
RECOGNITION (Psychology) ,FEAR ,WOUNDS & injuries ,SCALE analysis (Psychology) ,ATTITUDES toward illness ,T-test (Statistics) ,DATA analysis ,CARDIOVASCULAR diseases ,ALZHEIMER'S disease ,CRONBACH'S alpha ,BREAST tumors ,STATISTICAL sampling ,RANDOMIZED controlled trials ,SPANIARDS ,CHI-squared test ,DESCRIPTIVE statistics ,HIV infections ,RESPIRATORY diseases ,SEVERITY of illness index ,CHRONIC diseases ,ATTITUDE (Psychology) ,MASS media ,MEMORY ,STATISTICS ,HEALTH behavior ,WOMEN'S health ,RISK perception ,CONFIDENCE intervals ,TUMORS ,DATA analysis software ,AIDS ,DIABETES ,INFORMATION-seeking behavior - Abstract
Background: Women report a heightened concern of (breast) cancer, relative to other chronic conditions. This experimental study investigated whether such heightened concern may be a function of availability bias. Methods: participants (N = 750; 100% female) were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions: in the recall condition, they were asked to name the health condition they feared most; in the recognition condition, they picked the disease they feared most out of a list of chronic conditions. Results: The probability of selecting cancer as the most frightening disease varied as a function of experimental condition χ
2 (10) = 112.13, p < 0.001. Participants in the recall condition were almost twice as likely to select cancer as the most frightening disease (N = 240, 59.10%) as those in the recognition condition (N = 121, 35.20%), who most frequently selected neurological diseases as the most threatening. The majority of participants believed that cancer was the disease receiving the most media attention (86.27%) (prior to the COVID-19 pandemic), and the one accounting for the highest number of deaths among Spanish females (63.50%). Conclusions: altogether, these results provide experimental evidence that availability bias may partly account for misperceptions and a heightened fear of cancer, which may narrow the scope of women's information-seeking and health-preventive behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]- Published
- 2024
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